dining

La Terraza

by Eric Jackson

What can it become? What will it become? What is it?

Up Via Veneto, on the hill that starts to rise from Via España and ends up near Colegio La Salle, higher (closer to Via Argentina) than the Torres Alba and the Las Vegas suites, you will find a series of little eateries on the left-hand side if you are looking uphill. One of these is La Terraza, which has recently been bought by a Texan, who has brought in a couple of American ladies to help run it.

One of these Panagringas, the person who essentially manages the place, is one of the gringo community's natural leaders, Melodye Taylor. An Army brat who partly grew up here, she came back to live a few years ago and is well known to a lot of people who have never met her except over the Internet. She founded things that provided invaluable public services and then got taken over by greedy jerks who ran them into ground attempting to use them for personal aggrandizement. 

Not just because of Melodye, La Terraza is fast becoming an important gringo community hangout. Because the place is so small it's easy to fill. The lack of walls make it a place where people can smoke without making it smoke-filled, and allow the music they play to carry onto the street and attract a clientele who miss that sort of thing.

(Like all semi-outdoor places in the area, it also attracts panhandlers to annoy those sitting at the tables closest to the sidewalk. This sort of thing is part of a larger problem from which this entire business district suffers, and about which bouncers and the Tourism Police can only do so much.)

La Terraza is a bar and a restaurant, more of the former at night when the partying gets underway in earnest, more of the latter during the day and early evening.

Quite frankly, this reviewer is not much of a bar fan, and so this review is about their food, not their drink or their late-night party ambience.

They do Buffalo wings and burgers, though I am told the menu will be expanded just a bit. There is an active lobby for Texas-style chili and let me put in my second for that motion.

I did La Terraza's "Buffalo burger" --- "buffalo" as in the flavor of Buffalo wings, not as in made from the meat of the American bison. It's advertised as spicy, but as it comes it really isn't. However, they give you plenty of a nice hot sauce to go with it on the side and with the flame turned up a bit that way it works quite well for this Colon buay's palate. The burgers themselves are the biggest on a street that has McDonald's, Wendy's and Manolo's.

This establishment, on very small and cheaply built rented premises that make the expansion of the kitchen and bathrooms a problem, may have already become so successful that it has outgrown itself. It has been so quickly successful that there are individuals who for whatever reason --- mostly because it's a feared competitor, I suspect --- are going out of their way to tell people over the Internet and otherwise that it doesn't exist.

With this kind of immediate appeal, the money to expand or relocate might possibly be generated, because that's what will be needed if the business is to survive. There's a demand for this kind of Baby Boomer American mix of musical genres, this kind of fun company, this kind of American-style informality, and a place for gringos who can't relate to the pretentious to hang out.

The burgers and beer? They do those well enough, and I'll surely be back to try the Buffalo wings too. But La Terraza is most of all a social phenomenon.